What it is
Retire or Stay is a calm tool for one decision: whether to retire early, or stay a little longer. It does the arithmetic that actually matters for that decision — how much sustainable income a portfolio produces at a stated withdrawal rate, whether that covers your spending, and crucially whether it survives the bridge years before Social Security and Medicare. Then it lays your own answers about life after work back out so the trade-off is visible instead of looping.
It is the sibling of a tool for a different decision — whether to quit a job — built on the same principle: be honest about what can be calculated and honest about what can’t.
What it refuses to do, on purpose
These aren’t features that were left out. They’re the point.
- No fabricated precision. No happiness score, no regret percentage, no confidence number. Every figure shown is computed directly from something you entered, by arithmetic you can trace. If a number can’t be honestly derived, it isn’t shown.
- No manufactured urgency. No countdowns, no exit-intent popups, no alarm-red styling engineered to make a life decision feel like an emergency. It is deliberately quiet.
- No keyword-spam pages. The site is exactly five pages. It will not become a thousand near-duplicate “retire at 55 with 500k” doorway pages, because that would make it worse, not bigger.
- No advice funnel inside the result. Where it points you to a fee-only fiduciary, that is advice to you, not a paid referral. The big calculators put a “match with an advisor” button inside the answer. This one doesn’t, and won’t.
Why refuse the profitable version
Because the honest version is the one that keeps its standing — with readers, with search engines, with ad policy — instead of getting deindexed or distrusted. The restraint isn’t ideology over revenue. Over any horizon that matters, it is the revenue strategy.
How it makes money
Eventually, through clearly-labelled display advertising — placed only above the tool and after a complete result, never in the middle of someone’s reasoning. That’s the entire model. No affiliate links to brokerages, no lead-selling, no sponsored “recommendations.” If that ever changes, this page will say so plainly.
What it is not
It is not financial, tax, or retirement advice. It does not model investment returns, inflation year by year, taxes, or sequence-of-returns risk in detail — it shows the structural shape those richer models sit on top of. For the detailed version of your specific situation, a fee-only fiduciary is worth the fee. And if this decision is weighing on you personally, a person you trust is worth more than any website.